Category Archives: Simply Dead

Epidemics – Smallpox

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In almost every Will Rees mystery, I include at least one profession and one illness. In Simply Dead, for example, I studied hoop making (for barrels) and lumbering. One of the characters is severely ill with diabetes.

In A Circle of Dead Girls, tuberculosis was the disease of choice. Because the story is set against the early days of the circus, I included details about wagons and early magic tricks.

In Will Rees Number 10, A Murder of Principle, I am including smallpox. Like Covid-19, smallpox was a viral disease and greatly feared.

The initial symptoms were similar to the flu, Covid-19 and many other viral diseases: fever, muscle pain, fatigue and headache. Before the distinctive rash erupted, small reddish spots appeared on mucous membranes of the mouth, tongue, and throat. 

The characteristic skin rash form within two days after the reddish spots on the mucous membranes. The rash was formed of pustules with a dot (that became filled with fluid) in the center. These spots scabbed over and then the scabs fell off, usually resulting in scarring.

The origin of smallpox is unknown although the theory says the virus developed in certain African rodents 60,000 or so years ago. The earliest evidence of human illness dates to the third century BCE with Egyptian mummies It is a lethal disease with a fatality rate for the ordinary kind of about 30 percent. Higher among babies. The Malignant and Hemorrhagic forms are over ninety percent fatal. Occurring in outbreaks, it killed hundreds of thousands, including at least six monarchs in Europe. In the twentieth century it is estimated to have killed 300 million alone. As recently as 1967, 15 million cases occurred worldwide.

In 1796, Edward Jenner discovered that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, a much less serious disease, did not come down with smallpox. He began a trial and proved that inoculation with cowpox prevented smallpox. Inoculation with the live virus had already begun but, although the disease tended to be less severe and less fatal, some people still died. The cowpox was safer.

Later, the vaccine was made of the killed virus. In Great Britain, Russia, the United States vaccination was practiced. However. My father contracted small pox as a toddler and lived to tell the tale. I am old enough to remember my smallpox vaccination and still bear the scar on my upper arm.

A concerted global effort a to eradicate smallpox succeeded with the last naturally occurring case in 1977. (The last death was in 1978. A researcher contracted the disease from a research sample.) WHO officially certified the eradication of smallpox in 1980.

The white plague

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In my Will Rees mysteries, he meets people who are ill with tuberculosis several times. The frequency of deaths from this disease in my fiction in not an accident. It was an epidemic and still has not been eradicated. In 2017, there were more than 10 million cases of active TB which resulted in 1.6 million deaths; it is therefore the number one cause of death from an infectious disease. Most of these deaths, and most of the new infections, occur in the developing world.

 

I was mostly familiar with TB as ‘consumption’, a disease that afflicted Victorian poets. Although TB was common in both the poets, the upper classes and the slum-dwellers, it was not a new disease during Victorian times. It has been around for millennia. Bison remains from 17,000 years ago display the effects of the disease.  (No one is sure if TB jumped to humans from the bovine like smallpox or whether it developed independently.) TB scars have been found on Neolithic skeletons and on the spines of Egyptian mummies.

 

So, it has been around a very long time. Despite that, it was not identified as a single disease until 1820 and the bacillus that caused it was not discovered until 1882 (by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel prize but failed to recognize that one of the transmissions of TB was via infected milk.)

 

Before the advent of antibiotics, and even with the best care in the sanatoriums set up for this purpose, 50% of the patients died within five years. In 1815, one in four died of the illness in England.

 

Antibiotics beat back the disease, but new drug resistant strains raise the possibility of a new epidemic. Even now, in modern times, about one quarter of the world’s population is infected with TB.

Diabetes circa 1800

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As Rees investigates murders, he invariably meets people who are ill. Illness and death was a constant companion. Illnesses: measles, mumps, diphtheria carried off infants and children; about one in five. Tuberculosis was epidemic. Women succumbed to childbirth. Simple accidents caused death, if not by the accident itself by sepsis.

Diseases we think of as modern, such as cancer or diabetes were present but not identified by name.

How do we know diabetes existed. About 3000 years ago the Egyptians described an illness with excessive thirst, urination and weight loss, the symptoms of Type I diabetes. In India they discovered they could use ants to detect the disease because the ants were drawn to the sweetness. And the Greeks called the disease diabetes mellitus ; diabetes for siphon or pass through and mellitus for sweet.

Early treatments included a diet of whole grains, milk and starchy foods, rancid animal meat, veal and mutton, green vegetables. Other treatments recommended exercising, reducing stress, wearing flannel – seriously. As one might expect, the true causes of Diabetes and possible treatments were not identified until modern times. In 1889, Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski found that removing the pancreas from dogs led them to develop diabetes. In 1910 Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer named the missing chemical, without which the body could not survive, insulin. That means island because the cells in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas produce it.

The first human subject took an insulin injection in 1922. So, although this illness has been with us a long time, its identification and the treatment is recent.

Why am I so interested in diabetes? Read Simply Dead and find out.

Lumbering in Maine

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Simply Dead is set against the mountains and the lumbering industry in Maine.

In the spring, logging camps were set up in the woods and the massive trees were cut down with nothing more than human sweat and axes. Lumber was important for building, yes, but this was also the era of sailing ships and tall masts were a requirement.

The loggers would ‘drive’ the logs down one of the many rivers to Falmouth. The men would ‘roll’ the logs down the rivers by standing on them. I describe this more fully in my book. The lumber drive would end in Falmouth with a celebration. (I’ll bet. Talk about dangerous work!)

Paul Bunyan and his blue ox are part of the American myth and he is based on the real lumber men. In Bangor there is a statue of Paul Bunyan.

Paul Bunyan statue in Bangor, Maine.JPG

Demonstrations of log rolling are a feature of some of the Maine shows.

 

The Shaker Murders and Giveaway

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I have arranged a giveaway on The Shaker Murders.

The Shaker Murders

I am hoping to prepare readers for my newest book, Simply Dead, which will come out August 1. The giveaway will begin June 7.

Simply Dead High-Res Cover

In the depths of winter, with a blizzard coming on, the constable Simon Rouge asks Rees for his help in finding his niece Hortense. Her cart had been found abandoned on the road and now she had been missing for almost two weeks.

The search for Hortense, and the unraveling of the secrets behind her abduction, lead Rees into the mountains of Maine.

Other murders, including the deaths of two Shaker Sisters, occur before Rees finally unmasks the killer.